We confess.

As digital marketers we are constantly scouring the internet for material – text, video and everything in between to keep ourselves informed of the buzz in business.

It’s a big part of how we arrive at content marketing strategies for clients.

Considering the amount of time we spend on the browser, we decided to try a few Chrome Extensions to help optimize our work. We were looking for tools that would help me organize our research and streamline processes like:

• analysing sites and the information they share
• scheduling and tracking our emails
• saving articles to read later
• sharing the interesting things we find and more

Here are 20 Chrome Extension we’ve found super useful.

BEST CHROME EXTENSIONS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT

Followr

Followr isn’t like other annoying means of acquiring a social media following. It works in a much simpler, honest way. It is a Chrome extension that is easy to set up and searches for related tweets every 30 minutes. The more you use your Twitter account the more followers you get. It scores high on relevance and is, therefore, a powerful tool to use.

DrumUp

Drumup is a Chrome extension which acts as your personal social media manager. Drum up understands your online reading preferences to show you related content. It also lets you share content from the web directly to your social media pages and schedule posts for later too.

Rebrandly

No more abstract, long links. The Rebrandly Chrome extension allows you to convert long-tail links into short custom links. You can add a keyword of your choice for more SEO juice. You can save as many personal links as you want to your Rebrandly account.

Rite Tag

Rite Tag is a clever tool that gives you all the possible popular hashtags you can use while posting on social media. It’s split into use now (green), use later (blue), try not to use (red), and don’t use (grey). This simple Chrome extension can also give you related hashtags when you type one into Facebook, or Instagram.

Buffer

The Buffer Chrome extension is one of the easiest ways to share content with your followers. It’s so simple that you don’t even have to switch between pages or copy-paste URLs. Just click on the Buffer icon on your tool bar and enter the caption you wish to share along with the post. Click Add In Queue. Voila! You’re done. It also has scheduling and analytics features that allow you identify top performing posts and times. You can then revisit your scheduling strategy based on these insights.

BEST CHROME EXTENSIONS FOR SEO

Ayima Page Insights

If you’re looking to boost your SEO game, this is one of our top recommendations. Visit a page you want to study and just click on the Ayima Page Insights extension to get a list of on-page insights like Meta tags, Meta description, Header Tags etc. It also highlights issues like incorrect tagging. The data is categorized as errors, warnings, notices and page info based on priority levels.

Mozbar

Mozbar provides a great deal of actionable information like on-page insights, domain authority and link metrics. You can also apply search filters like search engine, city, country etc. The Chrome extension has both free and premium features.

Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse provides a detailed SEO reference report when you check any page. It can be used to conduct quality checks on web pages. It’s particularly useful if you’re looking to find more actionable keywords and optimization tactics. It lets you conduct audits for performance, accessibility, applications and more.

Open SEO

Open SEO provides details like geolocation, traffic statistics, cache statistics, indexed pages, backlinks etc. It also shows the webpage’s rank on various search engines like Ask, Baidu, Bing and Yahoo.

SEOquake

SEOquake helps you discover your competitor’s SERP statuses, keyword difficulty levels, analyse internal and external links, view your social media stats etc.

BEST CHROME EXTENSIONS FOR CONTENT CURATION

Bit.ly

The Bit.ly Chrome extension is best for shortening, measuring and optimising links. It helps you customize links for your business and also keep track of which social strategies are working better in terms of engagement and reach. The chrome extension is available in free and enterprise versions.

Feedlymini

Feedlymini is a great way to catch up on your daily reading. The Chrome extension lets you archive all the interesting stories you come across. It stores them all in a single convenient location and ensures they’re easily accessible when you want to read them.

Save to Pocket

A simple, clean, and user-friendly Chrome extension that allows you to store articles, stories, videos, and more for later. It also helps you organize your library with tags. Coupled with the mobile app, this tool is powerful for content discovery and curation. The mobile app also lets you ‘listen’ to articles, which is great, especially if you’re the kind of person who prefers listening to reading.

Zest

Zest lets you recommend your content to a tribe of marketers. It also helps you identify thought-leadership articles, videos and podcasts from other marketers. The content is manually sorted and filtered by Zest making it a repository of quality content.

Content Clipper by Croncycle

An excellent way to save the things you see online, Content Clipper lets you create both personal and team accounts. It also allows you to identify RSS feeds so you can access similar content on Croncycle.

BEST CHROME EXTENSIONS FOR CONTENT DEVELOPMENT

Buzz Sumo

The BuzzSumo Chrome extension is an extremely useful tool for any content developer. It gives you useful insight into the social media presence of any post or page. All you have to do is be logged into your BuzzSumo account and you can get an overview of the content’s performance including Facebook engagements and Twitter shares.

Diigo Web Collector

The Diigo Web Collector Chrome extension lets you save pages and highlight the content you wish to use later. Content writers spend endless hours researching; it can get hard to keep track of all your resources. Diigo offers the perfect solution by helping you create a library of your resources.

Grammarly

Grammarly is the perfect tool to check your spelling and grammar when you are writing on the web. A poorly written blog post or email is more likely to be ignored compared to a well written one. The Grammarly extension acts as an instant proof-reader to help improve the readability of your content. It also comes with a downloadable add-in that works like a charm with MS Word.

Nimbus

Nimbus is the perfect Chrome extension to ‘screenshot’ anything. Whether it is the whole page, the visible part of the page, or just a certain section of the page, Nimbus allows you to capture an image as you like it. It even offers advanced editing features like blurring, adding borders, arrows, text and more.

Soapbox

Soapbox is a free Chrome extension that enables you to record smooth videos. It offers easy transitions that make creating amazing videos super easy. It even offers split screen, full-body, face-specific, and multiple webcam feed features. With the Soapbox plugin you can record, edit and share your videos faster than you thought would be possible.

Source: Soapbox Chrome Store

And here’s a bonus for surviving that long list!

Ghostery Ad Blocker

Ghostery is a Chrome extension that helps protect your privacy while you surf the web. It has built-in ad blockers which improve your browsing experience drastically. The Ghostery Chrome extension shows you active trackers on websites and allows you to block them.

Well, that’s all we’ve got in our arsenal. What are some of your favourite tools? Got any recommendations? Do let us know in the comments below.